Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
But the PCs have no authority to demand oaths from these men. Well, from a part of the pirates, possibly, though it would be resented by many of them. But none at all from the rest of the pirates, not the gansters and rebel slaves from Messemprar, and certainly not from soldiers of Untheri nobles and military commanders who are lent to this operation. In fact, the PCs have no formal authority to subject such troops to any disciplinary proceedings at all, being probably required by the strict letter of the law to report any alleged crimes to their formal superiors and asking them to try the accused under Untheri military law.
But since Untheri law was ossified and exception-riddled to the point of unusable complexity and arbitrary unfairness centuries ago, not to mention that large factions within the country have declared it invalid with the fall of Gilgeam fifteen years ago, the PCs have no intention of doing that. They'll try any accused men, no matter what their faction, under simple and sensible Purple Reign law, and punish in the field. Hopefully, success will excuse everything.
This is one reason I need to estimate this carefully and not just have it be unimportant background information. Executions among certain units that belong to other factions in Unther are going to have repercussions for all future plans in the region.
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I have to be honest, I do not think you will be able to find a way to make a careful estimate, at least if by careful you mean an estimate that is based off of historical, quantitative data for wartime atrocities committed by TL2-4 societies when a city was captured after a surrender. It is hard enough to get good estimates on army sizes in a given battle for this time, and casualty figures are even worse--and army size and casualty figures were figures that period chroniclers were interested in writing down (though often exagerated or based off of unscientific estimates)! As for the results of a seige for the local population, almost all of the sources we have that give any description at all of the actions of the common soldier are purely qualitative and mostly unhelpful in deriving the percision that you want.
I think you are going to have to settle for coming up with something that seems reasonable based off of the qualitative historical descriptions we have, though you may alternatively deside to import your own research on modern wartime atrocities--it will be anachronistic, but it may not be too far wrong.
Just bear in mind when you do this that everyone in a conquering army during this time had a vestige interest in not treating surrendering cities with brutality in order to encourage future cities to surrender as well. It also seems that even the common soldiers understood this (or were made to understand it by their commanders). It would be inappropriate to use atrocity figures in your PCs situation for seiges which ended with a city stormed by troops in battle (whether modern or ancient). Armies that took a city or fortification through forcing it to surrender (even after some fighting) were almost always careful to treat its citizens and soldiers with mercy. Saladin's capture of Jerusalem is a good example of this: after some hard fighting, Jerusalem surrendered to Saladin on terms that, for the most part, the population would not be harmed or enslaved and given protected passage to the remaining Crusader territories. Those that were enslaved were given a chamce to ransom themselves (or be ransomed), and many of even the common people were ransomed. By all accounts it seems that Saladin was able to uphold his part of the bargin and the people of Jerusalem were not badly treated. This is particularly surprising given that Saladin and his army had stated beforehand that they wanted to avenge the massacre that happened in the conquest of Jerusalem during the First Crusade by giving Jerusalem the same treatment when he captured it. So, the conquest of Jerusalem is one example where a TL3 army was able to take a city with basically no record of committing atrocities because the city surrendered under terms before it was successfully stormed, and it has the advantage of being an extreme case where the conquering army WANTED to massacre most of the populace but held back because of the surrender terms.
The above is why I suggested in my previous post using normal crime rates for the different people groups that make up your army, modified by influence rolls. Those that would break the rules to kill or rape anyway still will, but the city was not taken by storm, so there is not the same violent and disorganized initial contact between the citizens of the city and the PC army that would lend itself to wide-spread atrocities being committed in the heat of the moment. Even the common soldiers have a self-interest in treating the city's inhabitants with mercy so as to possibly avoid the danger of future seiges by encouraging cities to surrender without a fight.